Multimedia home entertainment is desirable to consumers who seek out new kinds of listening and viewing content that are made availability through a variety of communication media, including wireless broadcast and cable systems. Two such forms of multimedia home entertainment are pay per view (PPV) and video-on-demand (VOD) services. Each service offers a viewer a video (e.g., a motion picture) that is delivered for viewing by the viewer who orders and pays for the viewing. The VOD service offers the viewer a video that can be requested at any time and is available for viewing at the discretion of the viewer. Each service can be offered and delivered by wireless communication, such as satellite or cellular telephone services, or by wired communication, such as a cable television service.
Both the PPV service provider and the VOD service provider are referred to herein as a video delivery service provider, a network operator (netop) or a multisystem operator (MSO). The MSO offers video delivery services to viewers via a communication system by the distribution of PPV assets and/or VOD assets, which are collectively and individually referred to here as video assets. Examples of video assets include movies, TV shows, special interest programming, etc. Video assets are obtained from a content provider or other service having ownership rights in the video assets. The video delivery service provider, in turn, has received distribution rights from the content provider. As an enticement to the viewer, the video delivery service provider may provide an advertisement about a video asset. This advertisement may be referred to a video storefront. The video storefront is made up of discrete viewing panels or screens, each of which represents one video storefront page. Thus, the video storefront is made up of a plurality of video storefront pages.
The creation of the video storefront pages for a video storefront entails production time and management for both the content owner (or its designated third party) and the MSO (or its designated third party video asset aggregator). The various tasks necessary for a MSO to make one or more requests of the content owner for the video asset(s) and supporting the video storefront page creation requires significant coordination and communication between these two or more parties. The structure of a carousel at a headend of an MSO and common navigation controls made available for use by a viewer in order to select a video asset for viewing on an viewer input device (such as Home and Back buttons) must be communicated to a designer of the video storefront pages. This complication is significantly compounded by the normal business factors that constitute the MSO business operations. These normal MSO business operations include, but are not limited to, multiple headend locations, variations in headend infrastructure, disparate video delivery servers and back office systems, multiple content partners, different subscriber access rules, large disparities in video asset usage and license rights, and multiple video asset viewing windows. Coordinating the distribution of video assets to viewers, each of which can have complicated content ownership rights and distribution rights, can be a difficult and complicated task to perform by the MSO. There is, at present, an absence of automation tools to facilitate communication between several video asset owners partnered with an MSO. This lack of automated communication makes the tasks of collecting and scheduling video assets and video storefront pages advertising the same at each appropriate headend somewhat hindered. This hindrance diminishes the ability of the MSO to use a video storefront as a vehicle to promote video assets so as to increase video delivery buy rates by viewers. It would advantageous to provide systems and other tools to implement such an automated communication.